After a six-year hiatus, Danish rock band Mew have returned with new album '+/-' and are heading to Australia for the first time in their 20-year career.
Known for its overindulgences, progressive rock can be an endurance test thanks to lengthy guitar solos within songs about hobbits longer than ‘The Lord Of The Rings’.
For Mew, fitting the musical adventurousness of progressive rock within the confines of the pop song has proven to be a more successful and pleasant experiment. Over the course of 20 years, Mew has become beloved in their homeland of Denmark and across Europe, and released six albums to much critical acclaim worldwide.
Now releasing their first album in six years, the band are celebrating by touring Australia for the first time, a prospect singer Jonas Bjerre feels is “strange that it’s only happening now, but we’re very, very excited to be finally coming down”.
With previous albums, Mew has explored different concepts to expand their already grand sound. For '+/-', however, they have decided to focus more on the songs and enhance their already melodically rich compositions. “With our previous albums we had a framework figured out as we were writing, which I think worked for those albums.
“With '+/-', everyone wanted to feel more free with it, so we didn’t have any more rules. The songs became very diverse from each other, with elements from all of our stuff. There’s some poppier stuff, as well as some more experimental progressive rock elements. When you listen to the album it’s strange because there are so many different directions, but it still manages to sound just like us.”
During the hiatus, Jonas has kept himself busy by collaborating with members of Coldplay and A-ha in the supergroup Apparatjik. This spirit of collaboration continues on the new album, including co-writing a song with Russell Lissack of Bloc Party fame, and New Zealand pop sensation Kimbra providing vocals for a number of tracks. “What makes this album different is that we’re more open to including people.
“We met Russell when we toured the US with Bloc Party and always liked his style of playing, so we invited him in and co-wrote ‘My Complications’ for the new album. We connected with Kimbra because we’ve both been produced by Rich Costey.
“Through him, she asked if I could sing on a track on her album ['The Golden Echo']. I told her, ‘Now, you have to sing on one of ours,’ because that’s the trade-off. We sent her four different songs, and she ended up singing on all of them. She came up with some amazing harmonies and added so much to the songs and the textures of the sound.”
Having recently toured the US, where they performed with Kimbra for the first time, the band is now heading to Australia to debut their songs, which feel too large to be contained in performing spaces. “I don’t know what it is that we do that’s different to other bands to get a grandiose sound in the venues."
‘+ -’ is out now.
Mew Tour Dates
Wed 2 Dec - Manning Bar (Sydney)Thu 3 Dec - Max Watts (Melbourne)
Fri 4 Dec - Max Watts (Brisbane)
